At the Autumn Equinox, with Heaven and Earth perfectly in balance, the stakes are high. Does the season finale of American Born Chinese stick the landing and leave us satisfied? The show has tried to balance humor, drama, action, mythos, family, and cultural relevance, all with the wit and poetry of the original Gene Luen Yang graphic novel, updated and adapted for TV. In the penultimate episode, with the “A” plot colliding with the “B” and “C” plots (I’ll let you decide which is which), the finale has some “epic consequences,” as more than one character intones in the episode. Will Wei-Chen recover the Iron Staff, find the Fourth Scroll, and save heaven? Will Jin get to start at midfield for the soccer game? Will Anuj’s Cosplay Club outdo last year’s pregame float performance? I said the stakes were high, didn’t I?!?
SPOILERS Ahead for the first season’s eight episodes of American Born Chinese, along with the graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang. Let’s goooooo…
1. Not “Beyond Repair”
A pattern in this review will be how American Born Chinese does overtly what the “American Born Chinese” graphic novel suggests more obliquely. I’d make the case that each is effective for their respective medium, and maybe also apt for their moment in Asian American popular culture.
When Jin, in the opening of this finale, shows up on the set of “Beyond Repair,” the contrast with the Chin-Kee storyline is significant. Chin-Kee in the graphic novel is a haunting stereotype that continually threatens to break in and manifest as how Jin appears to others. When I read the graphic novel in my twenties, I related profoundly to those moments when I felt, with a sinking stomach, like someone saw in me just such a stereotype instead of a complex, human individual. The arc of the graphic novel (in my reading) involves an atonement with that stereotype that lets Jin get past some racial self-hate.
What the TV show does instead is to give the Freddy Wong character a ton of agency and, in fact, wisdom in the form of Jamie Yao’s reflections last episode. To have Jin ultimately step into the show’s storyworld in his dream as a place to confront, reconcile, and find courage to go forward, thanks to Guanyin, Anuj, the motivation of his parents, and a bit of that example from Jamie Yao/Ke Huy Quan, we’re dealing with an entirely different potentiality for representation in media and how creatives can transform what, in the past, was too toxically harmful to even touch. One might read much of Gene Luen Yang’s career as exactly that endeavor, with what he’s done with Shang-Chi’s mythos, Superman’s universe, the Shadow Hero, the Avatarverse, and a good many of his other projects. Quan’s career can be similarly seen in that redemptive light.
This opening scene of the finale plants a flag that this episode is going to bring all the separate threads of the story together…
2. “Everything is More Connected Than You Think”
Some strands of that interweaving are more seamless than others. Characters repeat that “everything is more connected than you think” until it’s the episode’s mantra, just as they recite that “tonight’s game has epic consequences.” Both feel like they weaken the point by their need for repetition. But wrapping everything up at the big soccer game stays true to the show’s (and the graphic novel’s) perspectival commitment to the everyday world of Jin’s social life. Yes, we’ll have shape-shifting confrontations and the skies tearing open and flight-based battle scenes… but it’s all going down at the high school soccer game in front of the hometown crowd.
To me, that’s the promise and the challenge of this show. Despite the heavy-handedness of stating the theme, the idea that “everything is connected” is key to the wonder of American Born Chinese. If you’ll allow me some more memoir, when I was an immigrant kid, I felt like I had to leave behind the stuff of my dreams– my father’s bedtime stories (populated by these very characters, Sun WuKong and such), my favorite comics heroes (Dragonball… before anyone in the US knew of it), my movie-thrills-inspired imagination (the martial arts sources for ABC’s choreography)– in order to belong in the Disney/ Batman/ Rambo-filled culture I assimilated into. Part of what made Yang’s “American Born Chinese” revelatory was his unapologetic juxtaposition of these totemic elements: the myths of bedtime stories and epic classics, the lunchroom racial politics of American nonwhite adolescence, the action figures. For “everything” to be “connected” in this show seems an intentional act of pulling together elements that refuse to be hidden away by embarrassment or shame.
Continued belowIt’s a beautiful idea, to me, in theory and in execution. In some places in “The Fourth Scroll,” I cheered aloud at the connections. Others fell somewhat flat or fit awkwardly. A case of the latter is the role that the Wild Flower Herbal Powder plays, first as Wei-Chen’s re-gift, then eventually as Guanyin-blessed restorative potion for the Monkey King. And the sudden central role of Anuj and the Cosplay Club performance arrived on a few previously-laid plot tracks, but despite being a fun nod to Jin’s nerd culture, could’ve more meaningfully connected to the subtle social examination of the first few episodes. Seems like all we got was the faint satisfaction of Travis fist-pumping the show.
3. “We Need to See Those Comics”
Those bits of connectedness that lifted my heart? One was Simon turning to Christine, the Monkey King’s words of regret about his son fresh in mind, admitting, “Children are a mirror. When I see our son, I know we’ll be okay.” The reveal that Jin is the Fourth Scroll, not the pendant, might’ve verged on cheesy. But there’s sincerity in the emotional discovery for Simon and Christine that their marriage has hope because of their child. An anodyne idea for modern Western psychology, but very, very real in their cultural milieu.
Another was Anuj leading the charge for Jin and Wei-Chen to find their answers in the pages of comics adaptations of Journey to the West such as “Dragonball” or the made-up “Phantom Fury 17.” I laughed out loud in Dicaprio-pointing-meme fashion when they pulled out all those single issues and volumes of comics, just to end up searching up the storylines on a web browser. Their search through those artifacts, along with the allusion to Harvey Elder/Mole Man in “Fantastic Four,” and the callbacks to KuGoRen, all touched the same blissful nerd nerve that the Transformers figure in the original graphic novel touched. Here, indeed, lie the answers!
4. “The Right Words to Draw You Out”
One of the apparently quite intentional departures from the graphic novel, and a sign of some maturation, is where Amelia’s affections and agency end up. Yang’s comic gives Amelia slightly more dimensions than I tend to remember, but in the end, her relationship with Jin is pressured and policed out of possibility, sending Jin on a spiral of desperate bad moves and self-loathing. Amelia ends up mainly a device.
Her series version is a corrective, taking more seriously the comic’s possibility that she does, in fact, have feelings for Jin. The comic Amelia could be accused of becoming an objectification of some petty and bitter, if perhaps understandable, feelings of rejection. But it all veers towards layers of racialized gender and sexuality narratives, the stuff of terrible jokes and dehumanizing misogyny and all that. I’m pleasantly surprised at who Amelia in the show turns out to be– and chagrined at my own surprise, to be honest.
Jin’s takeaway from Amelia’s confession (apart from the kiss he comes back for) turns out to be an idea for stopping Niu MoWang, not the teen drama right in front of him. We’re maybe supposed to take this as a sign of Jin’s growing up, caring more about saving the lives of his loved ones than winning the girl and the approval of friends. But it also winds up more than a mechanism to advance the conflict.
The scheme to draw out the Bull Demon, hoisted by his own petard of costumes and taunting, lets Jin play the brave hero in a way that’s true to his character. What’s at stake in his donning the cosplay to draw out Niu MoWang is, at least, his embarrassment, and potentially as much as his social standing and spot on the soccer squad. But he doesn’t give that a second thought the way he has all season, and that humble bravery is clearly worth as much as Wei-Chen’s mid-air combat or Sun WuKong’s staff-wielding.
5. “You have to Be Brave, Jin”
I wasn’t thrilled that the finale wrapped with an Act-Three-of-Marvel-movie action climax, complete with CGI-ed soaring through the air, blasts of blue electricity, and self-seriousness peppered with jokey quips. Forgive the constant comparison again, but I was so enamored with the indefinite ending of the original graphic novel, resolved and matured in some ways but still meaningfully unsettled. It feels like this season’s ending committed fully to the metaphor, loading the denouement onto the Journey to the West plotline. I personally wish we’d pressed into the literal side, the sociological questions and cultural complexities more. But this is a Disney+ crowdpleaser, not an offbeat FX dramedy, so what did I expect?
Continued belowPart of me wishes we could get that show, our Atlanta or Reservation Dogs or Mo. But I remain proud and somewhat astounded that we were able to get American Born Chinese. The stars shone, the production as impressive, and the adaptation did a lot of clever and brave things. If the show comes back for the second season its ending teases, I’ll be eager to see it… and still stunned that the odd and yet indelibly relatable graphic novel I fell in love with almost 15 years ago now lives on this big stage.
Most of all, I have to applaud the creators for the guts to go to these places on Disney Plus. The Marvel and Star Wars shows on the platform have been entertaining as heck, but they seem to just barely skim the surface of the profundity they tease, with a few exceptions. (Andor comes to mind.) To pack so much all-ages entertainment value into a show that so thoughtfully says something about being Chinese-American in 2023, or for that matter being a human being in our multi-generational and multi-cultural worlds, is an achievement.
My thanks to those who have followed as we’ve reviewed American Born Chinese. Hopefully we’ll see you back here for Season 2!
